Michael Mayes is an accomplished baritone from the tiny town of Cut and Shoot, Texas. "Look it up," he said. "It's a place." Mayes is preparing to play the lead role in the opera "Dead Man Walking," at the Mahalia Jackson Theater, March 4 and 6.

Mayes said that death row inmate Joseph De Rocher is a role he craved from the moment he first saw the opera. In recent years, he's been able to do so in five stagings of the chilling story. The New Orleans Opera production will be his sixth.

The opera opens with a horrifying murder scene, Mayes said, and his character's guilt isn't in doubt. It would be easy, he said, to write Joseph off.

"I want to be clear that the idea of the piece is not to in any way minimize his crimes or to induce the audience to feel sorry for him." The goal, he said, is to see the players in 3-dimensional complexity.

"When we encounter characters who commit unspeakable acts of evil, we consider them monsters. But if you delve into their lives, then it becomes too easy to just call them monsters," Mayes said.

That search for humanity, for some degree of understanding, is the challenge at the heart of the drama, Mayes said. The character of Joseph is contemporary, compelling, and sometimes brings about unexpected connections with the audience.

Once, when he was performing the role in Tulsa, Okla., Mayes said, he received a social media post from a woman who congratulated him for his singing and characterization. It was more than digital fan mail. The woman said she'd driven down from Kansas to see the opera.

"Your depiction changed the way I thought about the man who murdered my daughter," she wrote, Mayes recalled.

It was certainly an eerie moment, but for an artist, that sort of direct emotional communication was also a tremendous reward.

Dead Man Walking

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The opera is based on the 1993 nonfiction book by the same name written by Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun and Louisiana State Penitentiary death row spiritual adviser. A murder that is central to the book took place not far from New Orleans, Mayes said. So, "it's a certainty that there will be people in the audience for whom this is all too real, people who have been affected by the crimes."

The two New Orleans shows will be moments when opera achieves the ideal of "epic cultural issues, addressed with the epic art form," Mayes said.

Sinister tattoos

Operas from the classical repertoire such as "Tosca," "Carmine" and "The Marriage of Figaro," which are peopled with lavishly costumed fictional characters from some distant past, have their place in the romantic tradition, but "Dead Man Walking," Mayes said, is "a piece that's a culmination of trying to make opera as real and true to life as possible."

Mayes said that the authentic American language in the opera, delivered with the bayou accent he cultivated for the show, gives the performance additional veracity.

"The lines that are coming out of my mouth are hitting people right in the face," he said.

The array of sinister and racist tattoos that cover Joseph's body take 45 minutes to apply before each performance and seem uncomfortably authentic.

The hoped-for audience member reaction to the production, Mayes said is: "I forgot that I was watching an opera."

Broken fingers

As a high school football linebacker, who lived in a doublewide mobile home in the rural South, Mayes said opera was the furthest thing from his mind. But he broke three fingers in the face mask of an opposing player's helmet, which meant he had to drop typing class, which meant he had to take another elective, choir, which, it turns out, he had a knack for.

Or, as Mayes puts it, "I have a magic music box in my throat."

At the University of North Texas, he considered pursuing a business degree, but studied voice instead, which allowed him more opportunity to "show off."

Until college, he wasn't really aware of the scope of opera, he said. But, he discovered, "it was the coolest thing to sing and act at the same time."

To be on the professional opera stage, he said seemed "sort of like the NFL, the big leagues."

After graduation, he studied further at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and soon began landing roles.

The life of a professional opera singer wasn't always easy. Mayes, now 40, admits there were times he looked back longingly at the steady income and stability that a business degree might have provided. But by and large he's thankful he broke those three fingers all those years ago.

Mayes has performed in "La Boheme," "The Barber of Seville," "Rigoletto," "The Marriage of Figaro," plus American modern operas such as "Margaret Garner" and "Glory Denied."

In 2000, he earned a role as a prison guard in "Dead Man Walking" and set his sights on someday playing the anti-hero. In 2010 he played a motorcycle cop in "Dead Man Walking" when it appeared in Fort Worth. Finally in 2012, when a production of the opera was scheduled in Tulsa, he brazenly declared to the general director that no one could better portray Joseph than him. The general director agreed.

Pushups, arias and redemption

Of course, he said, he had to loose 65 pounds for the part. As he explained, the convict performs an aria while doing pushups. "That's not something you can do at 260 pounds," he said.

Naturally, Mayes expects audiences to consider their views on capitol punishment as they watch the opera unfold. But he promises that it is not a platform for political preaching. The opera doesn't insist you hold one opinion or another, he said. It's designed to illuminate the conflicts of humanity and taking responsibility. When his character says goodbye to his mother for the last time, Mayes said, the scene kindles a wave of empathy in everyone, he said.